“Social shopping” site Nuji clinches $2m seed funding

London-based fashion and lifestyle e-commerce site Nuji, listed in the 2013 Startups 100, has secured $2m seed investment from early-stage investors The Accelerator Group (TAG), Samos Investments, Seedcamp and various undisclosed angel investors.

Founded in November 2011, Nuji is an online department store built around personalisation and “social shopping”, which allows users to create public wishlists from the site’s catalogue and track similar lists from others.

It also operates an affiliate model which enables users to get discounts on their favourite stores.

It will use the seed finance to support the development and launch of its iOS app in April, having previously attempted to launch on mobile, with the end-goal to become “the largest department store on the Web”.

Nuji co-founder, Dean Fankhauser, discussed its plans for the funding: “Now that the website is more mature, it’s the right time to tackle mobile based on our learning.

“It was very important that we focus on web or mobile in the beginning, not both. We wanted to make mistakes on one platform and once we were confident in our product strategy based on thedata we had, we were more comfortable to dive head first into mobile.”